Uncharted Thoughts.

Its been a while. And a LOT has been going on. I got into my masters course at Salford University, studying News Journalism which starts in September 2024. I moved back to my hometown to work in kitchens to save some money for the next academic year. Along side this, I’ve started writing for my hometowns local journalist website… for free… for experience. Ironically writing about our towns cutest puppy and top six places to eat in (insert place) has taught me more than I could possible imagine about the the role of a journalist. Furthermore I also reluctantly redownloaded my social media accounts, believe me it wasn’t a choice I made lightly. I needed it to help with writing local articles, on dogs, on places to eat, and whatever else isn’t happening in this small town.

Turns out social media is a double edged sword. During work hours as a journalist there is no better way than using social media to get your message out there. It also helps when it comes to finding stories and contacting people regarding events that have occurred. Additionally, it is a great platform for showing co-workers memes.

My relationship with social media has been non existent since 2018. After reading a book ‘Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now’ by Jaron Lanier, I decided to be a cat… rather than a dog, therefore deleting my account. A cat, rather than a dog? What on earth am I talking about?

Well, not to steal Jaron’s phrasing, but at the same time I am going to do just that for the next couple of paragraphs. Although we love both cats and dogs equally, when it comes down to it. We know which one is free and which one is obedient. A cat preforms a trick because it wants to, a dog preforms a trick because its told to. While obedience and loyalty are both incredible attributes, obedience to our loved ones and loyal to those we hold dearest. Freedom, is something far more important than we give it credit for, especially here in western society where we are, to some extent, free.

Wait… hold up? What has this cat and dog analogy got to do with social media and freedom? Well, if you are unaware of the fact social media is manipulating your every move and taking away your freedom to think independently, then social media has done its job well. Ladies and gentleman, we are being manipulate. Every time we open our social media accounts to check what our friends are doing, spy on our ex’s or swiping through mindless ‘reels’ we are being fed small dosses of dopamine. Don’t believe me, read on. Do believe me… read on. Because just how far this manipulation goes may surprise you. George Orwell’s 1984, was both a bullseye, and a complete miss.

Addiction…

We all have our things, our vices. You know, habits, itches, routines or addictions. Be it smoking pot, smoking cigarettes or perhaps vaping is amore up-to-date with the times. Having one too many beers after a hard days work, three times a week. Or working out at the gym until you are unable to move, as a result of some bad news. Maybe watching porn is how you relax and get out all those pent up frustrations. Or, although not advised… possibly hard drugs is your way to escape the realities of life, be it, cocaine, crack, E’s, uppers, downers, lines, juice, injection, inhalation… whatever your tipple. Maybe its sitting down and playing video games, slaughtering pixilated men and woman by the thousands, recreating genocide while screaming at a fourteen year old from India down a headset. Running very very long distances might be a why to get away from mental destruction? Eating… that’s a big one. Whatever it may be, there is one word that links all of these addictions and social media together…. Dopamine.

So, what is Dopamine? Although I am no neuroscientist and probably wont be any time soon, I am going to attempt to explain Dopamine in the simplest way possible. I do recommend doing some independent research on this topic to have some clarification on my simplified version of this complex topic.

Dopamine is a natural chemical produced in the brain that is used by our nervous system to send message across the body. Dopamine is linked to so many parts of the human condition, from our movement, memory, sleep and lactation. It is also the primary reason we feel pleasure, be it sex, food shopping or video games. Dopamine releases chemicals into our bodies that harness the feeling of pleasure and a sense of reward and achievement. Not to overcomplicate things, lets stick to this very refined conclusion. If you are interested in looking into this further, I will put links at the bottom of this post to help you navigate through the best Dopamine articles.

So we have a built in reward system in our brain that also allows us to feel pleasure, that’s great. This reward system helps us humans determine whether an activity, or thing is to be avoided or approached. For example, after exercising we feel a great high. Its very common in runners as they reach new distance or speeds they experience a ‘runners high’. This is our brains reward system telling us that what we just did, those ten miles, where good for us and so here’s a little dose of pleasure. Although it is far more complicated and scientific than this, words like proteins, and neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors are often used to throw off us amateur researchers. At its core however, dopamine is a reward system built into our brain that releases pleasure for us to enjoy after completing a task.

This is all well and good, until we get to the little flaw in our reward system. After millions of years of evolution, our brains were not ready for the stimulations of the 21st century. Homo-sapiens for a debated period of time, lived within small communities that hunted, fished and gathered nuts, eggs and berries. The reward system was put in place to help their survival. If these early humans went long periods of time without sugar, their pleasure response when eating a berry would have been through the charts. Bringing down a large animal, after tracking it for days with a small group of friends, would have had an astronomical feeling. We still get this feeling today in nature. For any of you that have managed to light a fire in the wild, capture a fish or build a shelter, that instinct hasn’t left us, and you feel it when you complete a basic survival skill.

So, what do we get when we apply this to the modern world? Well, I can tell you and unfortunately its nothing good. With fatty foods, sugar, salt and whatever other enticing chemicals our foods hold today. Our brains are filled with that feeling of pleasure every time we bite into that frosted donut that fat co-worker brings in every Friday to make themselves feel better about eating an entire box on their break. Where else can this be applied? With social media of course. We have become addicted to that feeling of being ‘liked’. Each time we got a notification, BING, a small dose of dopamine surges through our body and fills us with pleasure. Flashing emojis, short funny videos, friend requests and memes all have the same affect on our brains. Addiction Centre, recognise that ‘Social Media sites, light up the same part of the brain that also ignites when taking an addictive substance’.

Before we continue, there is one more little hinderance to pleasure surging through our brains. Pleasure, can result in addiction. In the olden days, addiction was something related to drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. After much previous study and ongoing study, the cause for addiction has been placed at the heart of pleasure. We can be addicted to anything that brings us that hit of Dopamine. And as we will discuss in the next part of this blog… that includes social media. Addiction Centre, state that ‘Social media addiction is a behaviour addiction that is characterized as being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas’.

In accordance with Data Report, the average social media user (whatever that means) spends 2 hours 23 minuets on their platforms a day. That’s 16 hours a week (rounded to the nearest hour) and 811 hours a year… 811 hours a year. Which if my calculations are correct, results in 39 days a years. This is just the average amount of time spent on social media, meaning, there are people out there, spending more than 40 days a year on their social media platforms. What could be done with those 40 hours I wonder.

Social Status…

Social Status, something we all pretend to not care about. Yet, deep, deep down inside out roots, we all do. From the Giga Chad to the edge lord, we all care about our social status, its just how we wish to be perceived that makes us who we are. Mr Giga Chad, probably wants to be seen as attractive, wealthy and physically dominant. Mr edge lord, wants to be seen as someone who doesn’t care about normal societal trends and likes to ‘live beyond all that man’. In reality, they both care just as much about social status… just one isn’t able to achieve the same as the other, so they negotiate with what they have.

Not to keep going on about our distant brothers and sisters of the cave times. But all of this stems from them. Social Status in the ancient times could have been more important or necessary for survival than it is today. Although this is mostly theoretical and to prove these theories we would have to conduct some questionable experiments, I personally believe that social status is one of the driving forces behind our culture and species. The fear of being the bottom of the pile, and what this will bring to a civilization, community or person, is enough to shape the world we life in. A recent discovery in Germany has uncovered that these social structures go back as far as 2800bc. ‘It appears early human societies operated in a complex, class-based system that propagated through generations’.

However, I don’t think we need to look back as far as 2800bc to understand this obsession with social status. Just look at play grounds. Watch and observe children in playgrounds and see the groups form, the social hierarchy reveal itself like uncovering a secret we have always known. Now, I do not recommend going to a playground and watching children, its a one way ticket to a black eye, arrest and your social status within your community being destroyed. I do however, recommend thinking back to your childhood and recalling the strange behaviour of our fellow adolescent peers. There were, groups. Remember there was girl groups and boy groups and mixed groups. Nerdy groups, sporty groups, that group that no one belonged anywhere so everyone in it was a outcast. There was always the guy or girl who fit in everywhere and just made people laugh. Just have a think… weird right? Now those groups were put into a hierarchy. Usually based on attractiveness and physical strengths. However, this is varied.

I could really delve into this and go on and on about the importance of social structures and status. But lets continue with social media. Social media is a platform that harnesses these social status anxieties. Using likes, we are now able measure someone’s social status without even meeting them. We are numerically able to discover the highest and lowest of our social climate. How many followers do they have? how many views do they get? or likes on their photographs? Do they look happy in their photographs? Do they have a nice car? a big house? a handsome significant other? All of these things are taken into consideration, subconsciously or otherwise. We seek approval, so we are able to lodge ourselves higher up the social ladder.

Now approval is dangerous. Look at rock stars, celebrities and successful business owners. They are told everyday how incredible they are. “You are so talented, here have this golden globe” or “Wow that last album was so creative, you are amazing and so deep have a MTV award” or “You made over £3 million pounds in revenue last year, you are so cleaver, here have this business persona of the year award”.. this appraisal turns people into deranged narcissistic morons. With more approval and worship, comes more more deluded thinking. For example Julius Caesar, was so ridiculously worshiped, by those who wanted to keep breathing that he appointed himself untouchable by law. He had grown too powerful, told too often he was the greatest general and politician that had ever lived, considered by some as a God. So much some he eventually believed it. This approval and praise was like a drug to Julius, he believed he was a God among mortals, untouchable, the top of the social chain.

Not to go off topic too much, but it is said that Marcus Aurelius hired a man to walk with him and whisper “You’re just a man, You’re just a man” as he was praised by his court.

Anyway… social media can fix our cravings for social acceptance, to help us feel like we are climbing that social hierarchy pyramid. With just a click of a button, you can be as famous as a Roman Emperor and claim all the fame, power and wealth with just one post. And all this started with a ‘like’ and a drop of dopamine. They say Cannabis is the entry drug. Harmless, but its what comes after that kills you. Perhaps, the like button is harmless, its what comes after that brings total destruction and chaos.

Segregation of thought…

How many times do we hear that “The worlds gone crazy” or “It seems like the worlds coming to an end”. Well, the world hasn’t gone crazy, and, as far as I know, isn’t going to end. What’s gone crazy is what we’ve put into the world. What have we added to our glorious planet that could possibly turn everything upside down? Weapons? Is the nuke to blame for this craziness? No, we have had weapons since… forever. The nuke as been around since 1945, and things weren’t as crazy then as they are now, were they? What about politics? Well, nothing has really changed there, corruption, lying and false promises have been a part of politics since the Roman Empire.

The crazy parasite we have introduced to this very balanced ecosystem of a planet, is social media. A plague that is ravishing the land between us and growing a canyon of silence between two loud noises. Where both sides are trying to shout its way to the top. The world isn’t any more or less crazy than its even been. COVID, Gaza, Ukraine, human rights, financial problems and philosophical ones have been a issue since the dawn of man. If anything, things have got better. COVID lasted three years at the most, killing around 7 million people, the black death killed between 75 – 200 million. The Spanish Flu between 17 – 50 million. War in Gaza and Ukraine is a terrible thing, a catastrophic set back for progress. However if you calculated every death that has occurred since the end of the second world war and combined them, civilian and military, you wouldn’t come close to the six years of the second world war… Wanna fact check that, look at this… https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace. Human rights issues, the killing of George Floyd and the murder of Indigenous people is a terrifying statistic. Yet relations between racial groups are at an all time high and is continuing to improve over time. Financial issues are a growing issue in the 21st millennia, yet less people are starving to death today that ever before. In fact more people die of obesity than they do starvation.

What I am trying to get at here, is that all these terrible things that are happening in the world are magnified by social media. While we all sit at home, scrolling through Facebook we are sold a narrative of the world that suits our overseers. Positivity doesn’t sell. Why? I don’t know, but the fact of the matter is bad news sells, good news doesn’t. Although millions of videos were posted on social media in 2020, some of which contained similar content. Why was it the George Floyd video made a impact on the world platform? Was it because we witnessed a man die on camera? Perhaps, but no, that can be found everyday somewhere on the internet. Was it because that video had content we found useful? No, it was a man being murdered. It was due to the fact, it sold. It was negative, that one of the key points to selling on social media. It was relevant to a growing political ideology and it helped sell a narrative that injustice was being done. Sell a narrative… I used that phrasing on purpose.

Every time we open our social media account we are bombarded with negative news… If you are left winged, you’ll be sold articles on human rights issues, animal abuse and the environmental crisis. Or, you’ll be advertised magic crystals that help with your ‘energy level’, vegan recipes, Buddhist quotes and Pride Flags. If you are right winged, you’ll open social media to a hail storm of immigration issues, how Islam is taking over Britain, and Tommy Robinson at Oxford videos. Or, you will be sold Peaky Blinders T shirts, home protection equipment, Winston Churchill quotes and the Union Jack.

Segregation is a strong word, with strong connotations. Yet these separation of political ideologies has to stop. The Red Scare was a irrational panic that burnt its way through the West between 1947 and, well when it finished is debatable. The fear that your neighbour was a communist spy may seem ridiculous today, but in those Cold War periods, nothing could be more terrifying. Today, we have a new ‘Red Scare’. I like to call it the ‘Grey Scare’. The left despises the right. Thinking them a group of violent Neolithic racists. The right loathe the left and considering them weak, snow flakes that act as a parasite to the natural order of things. No one wants to be seen with a member of the other group, no one wants be be friends with a leftist snow flake, or a right racist. And speaking from experience, no one wants to date one of the other.

We are being pulled away from each other, day by day, year by year. Until it comes to something I dare not mention. Social media is often advertised as anti-social media, but that is not the correct word for what these platforms are becoming, it should be known as a ‘media segregation platform’. A separation of ideas enforced by a AI algorithm. We are being pulled apart by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Liang Rubo. Our freedom to choose a path in our lives is being disrupted. We are no longer buying products, we are the products.

I don’t want to press to much further with this section of the blog as I expect I have lost most of my readers already… due to attention span issues, something else social media has cursed us all with. But I do want to highlight the importance of this Grey Scare and the segregation of thought. Putting conspiracy theories aside and looking at where this could lead if the two sides of these political gaps are not resolved. We will see further and further separation. We will witness more drastic acts of protest, violence and terror from both sides. This can, and very nearly has in the United States, result in civil unrest and war. So if you delete social media after this or not, I think the most important message I have here is to remember that we are all being dragged into political realms by higher powers and we must try to recall some humanity for each other.

The Algorithm

I think I will keep this part short. I hope, you already know about this, and if you don’t you really, really need too.

Social media is run by an Algorithm. This algorithm is put in place to keep relevant news, posts and videos going to people who are going to find them interesting. Like I said before, if you are a left winged hippy. The Algorithm is why you are sold healing crystals and woke ideologies. What would a right winged nationalist want with healing crystals… well maybe that is were we are going wrong, maybe we should sell the angry people love and the lovey people fear. So to sell things, social media has to have you look at it. To do that the algorithm will show you things you like… right we got this under wraps I think.

So, this segregation of thought is ran by the Algorithms. A AI ran system that has no thought, or feeling. It just keeps improving its purpose, and that is to sell small hits of dopamine for as much of your attention as possible. The longer you look, the more it sells to you. The longer you look the more dopamine it grants your brain to produce. The more dopamine you have surging through your body, the more likely you become addicted. If you are addicted, then you’ll spend more time looking. Its a vicious circle that ‘they’ are profiting from.

Delving very quickly into the strange. It is rumoured that social media platforms have been known to take pictures of your facial expressions through the front camera of your phone or device so they can witness the changes in your facial expression and skin colour. This is to help improve the algorithms capability of finding things you like. If I showed you two pictures one after another, one was of a sports car and the other of a Dungeons and Dragons book. I could tell by looking at you which one you liked the most. Perhaps you smiled and the sports car, and looked confused on the DnD book. This would tell me, that if you were walking past my shop, I’d have to have a picture of a sports car to get your attention. Now, put this into an AI algorithm and you got a refined selling machine that will keep you posted with all your wildest dream cars.

George Orwell 1984 was wrong… ish.

In George Orwell 1984 we see a dystopian world where the population of the United Kingdom are being oppressed by a tyrannical government that rules with a Iron fist. The subjects to this world can not have sex with anyone they love. They have no freedom of speech, thought or expression. They live a life of oppression and hate. This is not the world we are heading towards. Social media is our overlord and will remain so until we delete it from our lives. I know people, including myself, who state that they only use social media to speak to their loved ones, that they could delete it tomorrow if need be… then do it. Delete it and download WhatsApp instead or just get their number and message them. I know people who say, I am in control and I can put it down whenever I like. You sound like me when I was quitting smoking… you are being manipulated to think you are in control. You are not, that dopamine will suck you dry of time and energy.

Famous celebrity Jimmy Carr put it like this “George Orwell wasn’t right. Our power wont be taken away from us by some authoritarian master. We are going to give it away for cheap Dopamine. And the cheap Dopamine of video games, online porn and living online, is going to get in the way of real life.”

Who would have thought that the evolutionary development that was planted in our brains forever ago would be the destruction of our freedom and happiness.

Deleting your accounts… from my experience.

I have deleted my socials twice before, this will be my third and final time. I first deleted them back in 2018, I had an Instagram account and Facebook account. I decided to delete them because I read a book called Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now’ by Jaron Lanier. A computer scientist who was about at the beginning of it all. In 2022 I downloaded Facebook again, my curiosities got the better of me and I wanted to see what old friends were up to, I also wanted to contact some people I hadn’t seen in a while. This lasted less that four days, before I deleted it again. And now, I have Facebook back and it’s been two weeks. That decision has resulted in a long ass blog.

You may be nervous about deleting the account, well I can tell you from first hand experience. It is freeing. My average time of my phone has increased from one hour thirteen to two hours since having social media back. That’s precious time, I am wasting on being brainwashed.

You may be worried about loosing old friendships. If they are truly your friends, get their phone number and text them. People had friends before social media and phones.

Also, wanna know how drugs stay in your life? Because of drug dealers. If you could delete drug dealers, there would be a lot less drug addicts. Try deleting your social media right now… go on. Don’t do it yet, just try and find where the delete buttons are… good luck finding it without google. They have made it hard for us to delete it… why would they do that? To keep us their customers that’s why.

At the end of the day, this is your decision. Perhaps you will continue to use social media after reading this, perhaps not… but just know, this is only scratching the surface on what I could have written today. Be a cat, not a dog,